G.Kruk

1
Development Process of Accelerator Controls
Software

• G.Kruk
• L.Mestre, V.Paris, S.Oglaza, V. Baggiolini,
  E.Roux
• and Application Section developers

2
Agenda

• Development process
• Issues
• How we addressed them?
• Conclusions

3
Development Process
All activities from the moment a developer starts
a new project to the moment the resulting
application is running on operational consoles in
the control room
Operational Consoles
4
Context in CERN Controls

• 2002
• Support for C developments (under control of
  Make)
• No Java development process in place
• Java based on small interdependent products
• 130 products which use about 140 external
  libraries
• Dependencies tree very complicated up to 10
  levels
• 30 developers
• Need for supporting tools
• No mature solution on the market
• Work started on custom solution

5
Development Process Issues

• Projects and code organization
• Source versioning management
• Build services (automation of common tasks)
• Compilation, JAR
• Documentation generation
• Dependencies management
• Release management
• Releasing new versions of software in a dedicated
  repository
• Applications deployment
• Issues bugs tracking

(guidelines, naming conventions, directory
structure)
(CVS)
(JIRA)
6
Build services Common-Build

• Based on Apache Ant
• Java based open source build tool (like Make)
• XML based build file defining targets
• Functionality of Common-Build
• Provides predefined targets for everything needed
• Compilation, packaging (JAR)
• Source code specific descriptors generation
• Documentation generation
• Code quality
• Unit testing
• Prevents Copy/Paste syndrome
• Integration with the infrastructure in place
• Minimal effort to start

7
Target examples

• Compiling sources
• ant compile
• Building distribution of the product
• ant dist
• Releasing new version of the product
• ant release

8
Common-Build constraints(Directory structure)

• equipstate/
• build.xml
• product.properties
• product.xml
• people
• src/
• java/
• test/

9
Common-Build constraints(Build file)

• equipstate/
• build.xml
• product.properties
• product.xml
• people
• src/
• java/
• test/

Regular Ants build file that imports targets
from Common-Build (always the same)
10
Common-Build constraints (Services file)

• equipstate/
• build.xml
• product.properties
• product.xml
• people
• src/
• java/
• test/

Specifies the services to activate in
Common-Build during the build process e.g.
JavaDoc generation, unit tests, specific
descriptors generation
11
Common-Build constraints (Products descriptor)

• equipstate/
• build.xml
• product.properties
• product.xml
• people
• src/
• java/
• test/

Descriptor of the product and its direct
dependencies
12
Common-Build constraints (Release check list)

• equipstate/
• build.xml
• product.properties
• product.xml
• people
• src/
• java/
• test/

Specifies who has the right to release this
product
13
Dependencies management
Production repository
3rd party repository
Product A
Lib A
Lib B
equipstate
product.xml
ltproduct nameequipstate gt lt!-- --gt
ltdependenciesgt ltdep productLibA
version1.2.8 /gt ltdep
productProductA /gt lt/dependenciesgt lt/produc
tgt
14
Dependencies management

• equipstate/
• build.xml
• product.properties
• product.xml
• people
• lib/
• LibA.jar
• ProductA.jar
• LibB.jar
• src/
• java/
• test/

equipstate/ build.xml product.properties produc
t.xml people src/ java/ test/
ant getjars
15
Release Management

• Release Tool
• Also based on Ant
• Both for Java and C/C products
• Can be used without Common-Build

16
What Release does

• Extracts the product from the CVS to the
  dedicated production repository
• Builds the product (calling Common-Build)
• Installs it in a multi-versioned repository
• New version is added without modifying the old
  ones
• We can always use old versions
• Updates product aliases (symbolic links)

17
Release management(Production repository)

• Aliases
• PRO - production version
• PREV - previous versions (version which was
  replaced by PRO)
• NEXT - next version to be tested before
  becoming PRO

dist
accsoft
macsy
leir
client
equipstate
domain
PRO
PREV
NEXT
0.5.1
0.5.2
0.6.0
0.6.1
18
GUI Applications deployment

• We use Java Web Start deployment technology
  TH3A.2-50
• uses a special XML descriptor (JNLP file) to
  deploy and run applications
• ensures that all required libraries (cached
  locally) are up to date
• JNLP file specifies
• how to run the application
• where required libraries are found
• Repository contains all libraries and JNLP file
• We added a Web server to enable deployment via
  Java Web Start
• http//ltpath_to_the_distgt/macsy/equipstate/PRO/equ
  ipstate.jnlp

19
Conclusions

• We put in place a very solid development process
• The whole process is automated now
• We have a suite of integrated tools supporting
  the process
• We succeeded to make the deployment path short
  and simple
• This has been validated operationally